Human Motivation The Key To Understanding Procrastination

What makes one person a go-getter while another languishes? It's often the conditioning they've received growing up. What's interesting is that one stimulus will affect one individual one way while the identical stimulus might produce the opposite effect in another.

Pleasure And Pain
The two strongest motivators to humans are pleasure and pain. Pleasure is often associated with love while pain is linked to fear. We often find people who are motivated more by rewards in life. They strive for achievement to reap benefits from their actions. Others are motivated more by the need to avoid unwanted consequences. Again, pleasure and pain. All people switch from one to another as circumstances dictate but we all carry one or the other as our primary motivator.

For example, I'm motivated primarily by a reward while my wife is motivated more by the thought of experiencing negative consequences. She feels the need to save for retirement so she's not out on the street in her old age… negative consequences. I want my retirement to be a filled with fun activities and travel, which equates to rewards. Once again, pleasure and pain are the motivators.

Why go into such detail on personal motivation? Because I believe the way human motivation programs are configured might shed some light on why some people achieve while others don't manage to do much with life.

The Procrastination Dilemma

In many cases the habit of procrastination develops out of fear of negative consequences. This often begins during the formative years and carries forward into adulthood. Let's see how it might develop. If a child is an environment with an authoritative or critical parent he becomes conditioned to some level or fear or pain right from the beginning.

If he faces continued criticism or worse as he grows and tries new things, he associates productive activity with scorn and perhaps even abuse. This scenario serves as a warning to him that all but the most passive activity should be avoided. In time what started out as a simple coping mechanism becomes a behavior that later hinders a happy and productive life.

The particulars of this type of development may vary from individual to individual but are similar enough to produce the undesirable behavior in the adult. Unless something is done to reverse what has transpired, the individual is likely to continue the procrastination pattern even though the coping behavior no longer serves a useful purpose.

Regardless of what has spawned the unwanted behavior hypnosis has been found to effect the desired change to productivity. Here's the theory in eliminating procrastination using hypnosis. Using the premise that everyone is capable of great achievement, hypnosis is used to identify an individual's purpose or life calling. Living to fulfill that purpose provides the incentive for the subject to start taking action. Suggestions are also given to replace the untoward beliefs with supportive and nurturing ones. Many people have overcome procrastination with hypnosis. Perhaps you should look into it as well.